How my multicultural dream went sour

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Our correspondent, a New Yorker, imagined that life for her family on a London council estate would be a perfect example of community spirit. Then junk and urine in her garden, threats from neighbours and a drug-related killing outside her front door forced her to question her liberal values

SOMEWHERE between the time my children called out of the window to a dead man and his seriously injured girlfriend, “Would you like some chocolate digestives?” on the first estate, and the day I threatened to kill the wrong pit bull on the second estate, I started to understand how a good family could go bad.

The day I came back from the police station, after the care-in-the-community lady upstairs who hated white people in general and me in particular threatened to strangle me, my husband said, for the 100th time: “We should have stayed in the first flat.”